Person, takes charge of the child and retires to a Greek To her in his loneliness and desperation, and Darley, whoĪlike Durrell himself) is a very generous and obliging Melissa has had a child by Nessim, who has turned See Melissa, who is dying, but she is dead before he hasĪrrived. Teach in a rather dull Roman Catholic missionary college Suicide, leaving Darley some money, which he uses to get Whom Darley admires but dislikes, mysteriously commits Pursewarden, an arrogant and sarcastic novelist, Justine deserts Nessim and becomes a worker on a kibbutz in Somebody is shot, ostensiblyĪccidentally, but it is (again ostensibly) Capodistria. To a duck-shooting party on Nessim's country estate with Nervous, and Darley thinks that her husband Nessim (a highlyĬivilized man, whom Darley likes and respects) may beĬonspiring to murder him, her, or both of them. Notorious Alexandrian lecher, Capodistria.Īs the novel progresses, Justine becomes more and more Springs from her having been raped as a young girl by a Mirror, and because of a nymphomania which apparently Symbolically through her looking at herself in a triple It is Justine, however, who mainly obsessesĭarley, because of her multi-faceted character, represented Young artist, Clea, has also a sisterly fondness for him,Īnd spends a chaste night with him when he finally leavesĪlexandria.
Wife of a rich Coptic businessman, Nessim. Later, at her initiative, the lover of Justine, the Jewish Great Alexandrian poet Cavafy, he becomes a friend and Love (he rescued her from a terrible party where she hadīeen given an aphrodisiac) and he has accepted her out of Melissa, who has come to him out of gratitude rather than Sensitive but often blundering and mistaken way, the He is a young man very open to experience, exploring, in a Darley, like Lawrence Lucifer, hasĭurrell's own initials (L.G.D., ' Lineaments of Gratifiedĭesire') and a personality rather like the young Durrell's. The first three volumes cover roughly the same period of time, and the same series of events, inĪlexandria in the period leading up to the Second World War, and the last volume, Clea, carries the story forward into the war years, though continuing to develop the three basic themes of art, love, and death, or perhaps art, love, and mysticism.
All four were published in one volume, with numerous re-visions to iron out small inconsistencies in the text, and with a new preface, in 1962. Spiritual autobiography and as a young man's first finding of his real voice, it is on the four volumes of The Alexandria Quartet, Justine (1957), Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1958),and Clea (1960) that Durrell's world-fame mainly rests. If The Black Book has a special interest both as a kind of The Alexandria Quartetįrom a biography of Lawrence Durrell by by G.S. The Alexandria Quartet, chapter 5 of a biography of Laurence Durell 5.
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